Any hotelier worth his salt will know the importance of providing superior customer service. It naturally follows that he/she would also focus on measuring the consequence of their service – good or bad – in the form of reviews and feedback.

Having said that, for any hotelier to take concrete steps to improve service quality, crystal clear customer feedback software is essential, as ambivalent, unclear suggestions are of no use. This is because, the data they collect affects how they treat their guests overall and how they interact with individual travelers.

In the present setting of public display of customer satisfaction on online rating sites, leaving a questionnaire in the guest room and hoping for a response is simply not enough. The social media boom and the impact it has had on marketing has ensured that hotels view customer satisfaction as even more important to their business than ever before.

As a result, hotels are now trying to strike the balance between surveying customers and bothering them. Some of the strategies that hotels can follow for better feedback management are:

Appropriate, timely responses using a pre-set template

A recent research revealed that 87% of travelers had an improved opinion of a hotel if they read an appropriate management response to the customer reviews. Responding to all the reviews posted by the guests on multiple platforms in a timely manner is an important part of the Online Reputation Management (ORM) strategy of the hotels.

In addition, as soon as a review is live in any of these channels, the CRM system can reply automatically on your behalf using a pre-set reply template, which helps save a lot of time.

However, it is also important to take care that different reviews require different sensitivities, so any response must be drafted very carefully. Particularly for negative reviews, the response should begin with an apology and end with a promise to rectify the service immediately. A carefully crafted response can actually go a long way in healing the tarnished reputation.

Integrating customer feedback and reviews on disparate platforms

If your hotel has the presence across multiple social media sites and rating sites, which is good, it naturally allows your guests to give their feedback or review on any platform which they desire or find convenient. This right here, is a good start in eliciting feedback.

Then comes the question of making effective use of all the different channels at your disposal. An effective hotel CRM like Kapture can help bring all social media channels, be it Facebook comments, wall posts or tweets, together in one place, so when any customer posts any kind of feedback in any of these OTA, it is placed right in your ticket inbox. The most important advantage is that your employees don’t have to spend time scouring different channels to give an effective response to the customer reviews.

Collate feedback for better decision making

Replying to and acknowledging the customer reviews is just the beginning. In order to truly harness the power of feedback improving your business, you should be able to view them in the form of an inclusive dashboard. This can help collate the feedback you get in the form of reports and graphs, which gives you a macro view of your customer’s experience, thereby providing you with an insight into your service efforts.

This dashboard must be live and mobile-responsive, and display different parameters like the number of positive and negative reviews, guest preferences, which social media is garnering most of the reviews, areas of improvement etc. Moreover, the feedback pertaining to a regular guest gets automatically attached to his profile in your CRM.

This can help you understand the individual guest preferences and help you deliver a personalized service in the future. More importantly, a cloud-based CRM like Kapture can store these data on the cloud, so that different units of the hotel at different locations can have access to the shared, updated information, always.

Enhance the hotel’s online presence

It may be hard to believe, but even in the current era of technological advancement and customer empowerment, there are many who are unaware about the power of various social media sites and online review sites. Having a mere website won’t cut it anymore. It is important, even necessary, to ensure visibility across multiple online platforms and social media channels. This helps improve the visibility and lead to higher bookings.

A sample screenshot of how the Kapture CRM solution helps in feedback management and other aspects of the hotel industry is given below:

As seen above, the CRM system displays the guest feedback relating to parameters such as quality of food and service. By presenting data in form of pie charts, it is possible to guage the customer satisfaction levels precisely and therefore work on the aspects which need improvement. An additional benefit of having a CRM system is that it has the facility to automatically send a SMS or an email with links to give the feedback immediately after the guest checks out of the hotel.

Online Reputation Management is a necessity in the hospitality sector. With this view, a wise implementation of CRM software can offer actionable insights for hotels to ascertain that customer service personnel meet, or if possible, even exceed customer expectations. Improving customer service can help you be a step ahead of the competition and help build fruitful, long-term relationships with your guests.